Surgical sutures are by their very nature difficult handle and display in a manner that will permit the surgeon quickly and accurately to select the proper suture for the procedure being performed.
The prior art is replete with devices intend to hold or present sutures for shipment, storages and use. Some such devices are designed to ship or store sutures and are no)t suitable for use in the operating room. Other such devices may be used in the operating room but fail to solve all of the problems associated with holding and displaying sutures to make them conveniently available to the surgeon.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,769,214 to discloses a suture pack that appears partially to solve some of the problems in handling sutures. This device is, however, complex and difficult to assemble and use.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,714 discloses a different approach wherein each suture is separately packaged and the individual packages are displayed. While this approach has its advantages, it requires handling of packages in addition to the handling of the sutures and may make overall handling of sutures more complicated rather than simpler.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,601,185 discloses a complicated folding device for holding sutures that would tend to clutter the operating room.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,529,175 and 5,413,214 disclose suture packages which are compact but which do not display sutures for convenient retrieval in the operating room.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,335,775, 5,325,975, and 5,282,533 disclose apparatus for displaying sutures that are bulky and complex and do not offer means for placing the sutures in easy reach of the surgeon during a surgical procedure.
Springs have been used to support sutures. At first glance, a coil spring in which the coils are pre-stressed with a resilient bias toward each other, or can be separated only by a force acting against the spring bias, would seem to present a nearly ideal holder. The suture can be easily inserted into the spring, is firmly held in the spring and can, in concept at least, be easily removed. In practice, however, springs have not been well accepted as suture holders because of the tendency of the sutures to wrap around a coil of the spring and, thus, become extremely difficult to remove from the spring for use in the surgical procedure.
The present invention features the advantages of spring retention of sutures in a manner which solves the previous problems in using springs and also provides a convenient presentation of the sutures adjacent the surgical field.